"With iray rendering technology, what used to take product designers, visual effects artists and CAD users hours to render can now happen in a matter of minutes without compromising the quality and detail of the image, said Dr. Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research." The advent of iray is changing the face of this industry by increasing the standards in rendering efficiency as we know it."

iray speeds the creative process by easily enabling designers to accurately simulate their creations using materials and lighting that relate directly to the physical world experienced every day. Because it's highly scalable, interactive and physically accurate, iray technology allows design and engineering professionals to produce the highest quality final-frame output without the complexity inherent in other solutions.

Harnessing the power of the GPU and the NVIDIA CUDA parallel processing architecture, iray technology progressively refines an image until maximum detail is reached, providing a single process that smoothly combines interactive pre-visualization and final frame rendering. iray technology requires only a small number of intuitive settings relating to the physical world that delivers a "push-button" rendering experience for creating final-frame photo-real images.

"It's no secret that users want to utilize the power of GPUs for photorealistic rendering," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images. "With iray, we deliver a solution that not only leverages the GPU in the most efficient manner but also raises the bar for what is defined as photorealism in rendering."

iray will be included with mental ray 3.8 starting in late November 2009 at no extra cost to existing customers and OEMs under maintenance. iray will also be available as part of RealityServer 2.4, the upcoming release of the 3D web application services software. A future iray Integrator Edition will allow independent software vendors to include iray technology within their own products, while future integration with the NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine will make iray technology easily accessible to all SceniX-based applications. For more information about iray, please visit www.mentalimages.com/iray.